Exit Wounds
by TheObsessor11294
Summary: They knew Hydra had brainwashed Bucky. They knew that Hydra had experimented on him. They knew that he had killed and assassinated people on their orders. But what they didn't know, was that he hadn't done it alone…. "Loki…..?"
1. Exit Wounds

This story is a collaboration between myself and the fantastic writer Ordis. She'll be taking over for the Bucky Chapters while I handle the Loki ones!

Disclaimer: Absolutely none of this is ours. Otherwise, it would be up on the movie screens with the rest of the fantastic Marvel Movies.

Summary:After Steve, he survives and wonders just who Bucky is supposed to be. Meanwhile, HYDRA struggles to find and return their most elite agent to the fold.

* * *

It's been a week since he went to the War Museum.

It is strange, he thinks. That he was Bucky. That he _is _Bucky.

His days pass without meaning. He eats. Sleeps. Moves. HYDRA will be looking for him, he knows. If he remembered more about them, he might know how to avoid them better. As it is, he moves, puts a hat on, and hopes it will be enough.

He sleeps on the streets, mostly.

The Winter Soldier would have broken into an apartment and slept there, if he had needed to. He doesn't. He thinks this is not something Bucky would have done, and Bucky is who he wants to be. He forgets, sometimes. Feels himself forgetting. If he's woken too quickly. If cats fight near him, or dogs bark too loudly in the night. He remembers before he kills them. Mostly. He steals a coat, to cover his arm. It's not really stealing. It's in the trash. He thinks that makes it okay.

He visits the library, when he can.

They look at him strangely, but most people do that.

He ignores them. He's good at that.

He searches for Steve Rogers, for the Howling Commandos, for Bucky Barnes. He searches for SHIELD. It's in the news everywhere, what has happened. SHIELD is HYDRA. SHIELD is who Captain America worked for. Steve Rogers is a hero.

Bucky, apparently, likes girls, and likes scrambled eggs without salt on them. He knows, because Steve Rogers says so on the video clips, eyes soft as he recalls events that he cannot remember. He's not sure he likes them. He can't remember trying either. But Bucky is who he wants to be, so when he finds ten dollars in the gutter, he walks to one of the places that sells food, and asks for them.

"Without salt," he adds firmly.

He doesn't like them. They're too rich.

He eats them anyway. Bucky would have, and he is Bucky.

He does not visit Steve.

He has seen the way people look at him, when he rummages through the trash cans for food. He's seen the way people edge away from him when the nightmares—or should that me be memories?—come at night and he wakes shaking, feverish, vomiting. He smells like rubbish. He looks worse. He won't inflict this on Steve Rogers. Bucky wouldn't have.

Inside, something small and secret tells him that this is a lie. The truth…

The truth, is that he cannot have Steve looking at him the same way.

_O_

He gets a job. It's partly because he asks, and partly because he pulls back a kid from the road before he gets hit by the car that ran the red light at the corner. The kid is bawling when he lets go. He eyes it doubtfully, before shrugging. It'll go. They always do. The woman with it is frowning and the man is giving him the same look most people do.

"What's your name?" the man says at last.

"Bucky, sir," he says.

He isn't sure what you're supposed to look like when you want people to like you. He tries to look like Steve.

"Well, here's for your trouble. God knows you look like you could use it," the man says, offering him some paper.

It's 100 dollars.

He refuses it, mostly because they should not have to pay him just because he saved their kid, but partly because lots of other people's kids died because of him. It's not fair if he gets something from this. It doesn't count, then, wiping the other out.

They leave him then. He goes back to the library.

Bucky likes blue, Steve says.

He'll have to get more of it.

When he returns late that night, there's a piece of paper in the cardboard box that is currently his home. It's from Susan, across the road, who thinks that he is a lot more heroic than he is and needs a new laborer to help lift things at her warehouse because the last five either quit due to the low pay or she fired them. If he's interested, she's offering him a room and a job.

It's not an option, refusing.

She's offering food and a place to sleep and he's sick of moving.

He's sick of eating garbage.

He tells her yes, and accepts meekly the conditions that he will have to shave and wash each day. There are better jobs, but there are worse ones. This one will do, at least until he works out better what Bucky should want to be.


	2. This is War

A warning to the people,  
The good and the evil,  
This is war.

To the soldier, the civilian,  
The martyr, the victim,  
This is war.

- This is War by 30 Seconds to Mars

* * *

"You know that you have to come back," he says, leaning against the metal crate.

It is midnight, in the darkened warehouse. The shadows cling to them, only a pale lamp high above them to light the many boxes and metal containers that surround them. His partner has become scruffy, stubble lining his chin and dark bruises lining his eyes.

"No I don't," his partner says, not even looking at him as he lifted a box into his arms, carrying it into the large storage container with the rest.

"You do. You're just," a smile, thin and hollow in the light as the man steps back out, "Confused. That is all. You've changed, but they'll fix you. They always do."

"I'm…not who I thought I was," Bucky said softly, glancing away. "And…I don't think you are either…"

Blue eyes glance back at him at him, but he doesn't move from the shadows.

"That's not the mission. That's not _our_ mission. You know that. You've always known that. Partner," he says gently, leaning forward. "Come back. Whatever the Soldier did to you-"

"Don't talk about him." The former soldier snarls, his gloved hands curling into fists.

He bristles at the tone, drawing himself up. Unwanted. He is _unwanted_.

"I do not quite think you understand. _You_ are my mission. You _will_ come back with me." Back. Back with him. Back where his work is a _gift_ to the world and not-

"It's not my home."

"So be it." He says stiffly. If he must drag him back by the scruff of his neck, he will do so. He stands, pushing himself away from the crate and into the light.

His partner slowly reaches into his pocket, drawing a blade.

He stiffens. His partner wished to fight? His hand reaches back, towards the spaces between-

And then the soldier flips it, showing the hilt.

"This is yours, isn't it? Why did you give it to me?"

The green eyes narrow. He stares down at the blade, at the L engraved along the pommel.

"I do not..." **_Pain, do not re- do not- no, stop- please! _**

He comes back into himself, his head throbbing painfully from within. But as he lifts a hand to rub at his aching head, something blocks it. He squints, blinking at the metal that now encloses his wrists to the metal crate behind him. He turned, glaring at his partner.

"I am not going back." His former ally declares, blue eyes as cold as the season he is named for. "And if you ever come near me again, I will put a bullet between your eyes."

He snarls, turning, and it takes less than two tugs to wrench himself free of the electromagnetic cuffs. He pulls out his blade, turning to end this nonsense-!

Only to be greeted by the darkness that surrounded them.

He growls, knocking a fist back against the metal crate angrily, uncaring of how it warps under the force of his hand. Damn him.

_This mission is far from over._


	3. Searching

As written by Ordis.

* * *

**Searching**

When Steve sees the news footage, he's chopping up onions for chicken soup.

The onions never do finish getting chopped.

Steve has no idea who the guy (partner?) was that Ms Susan Boyle's newest employee briefly manacled to a crate and coldly threatened to shoot between the eyes, but there's no mistaking Bucky's face. He's in downtown, Washington, twenty minutes later.

The trail's cold. It's disappointing, but not surprising.

He knows how fast Bucky can move.

It's still more than he's had in weeks. He introduces himself, and once they've gotten over the fact that Captain America is interested in this, they're very helpful.

"I hired him when I saw him turn down money for saving a kid," Boyle tells him. "He didn't talk much. Sorry I don't know more. Was he a criminal?"

"He is a friend," Steve says. "Was he okay?"

"He was better, once he had the job. Lived on the street for a while though, in a box. He used to go through garbage, sometimes, looking for food."

Steve's never been more grateful for the wasteful tendency of people nowadays to throw out perfectly good food just because they don't feel like it. An odd pain mingles with the gratitude though, inside, because Bucky would never have let that happen to him. Bucky had never let him go hungry, even during the worst days of the orphanage. He needs to find him. If he'd come down this street a day ago, he would have.

"There are worse things in life than living on the streets for a while, man," Sam tells him, when he gets there.

It's true. Steve knows it.

It's just that he let Bucky fall, and he didn't look for his body. If he had, could he have stopped HYDRA hurting him? If he'd fallen, would Bucky have left _him?_

_You're my mission._

Steve doesn't know. He does know Bucky is his friend, and he doesn't want him starving, cold, and alone.

He searches the buses, the surrounding area, and four train lines.

Nothing.

He has better luck when he asks what Bucky used to do each day.

The library staff are helpful, like the police. They let him access Bucky's search history. It turns out to be a simple one. Clean. It has too much of Steve and not enough anything _else_. Bucky has watched nearly every YouTube clip there is of him, and read every news article, every blog post, and clicked nearly every photo. It's both worrying and oddly touching in a way that leaves him aching somewhere inside.

_Why didn't you come to me? How much do you remember?_

"Anything?" Sam asks.

"No. I'll keep looking," Steve says. His smile feels wrong on his face.

It probably looks so too, because Sam claps him on the shoulder, and tells him that that's exactly what they'll do, and they'll _find _him too.

They search all evening. The soup's burnt when they get back, and when Steve lifts the lid off, the smoke alarm goes off. Sam blames Steve. But since he also turns off the alarms and opens a window while Steve scrubs at the blackened mess inside his pot for twenty minutes or so (he gives up, then, and puts the thing in the sink to soak) Steve doesn't mind. They sleep with the window open. Who's going to rob him?

A part of Steve wonders why Bucky doesn't come to him. Wonders if Bucky would actually prefer it if Steve never found him, and if he's trying to leave the past behind.

Then he thinks of Bucky, on the street, and he thinks, when he finds him, he'll ask.

He returns the next day. Keeps searching.

Bucky doesn't return to Susan's warehouse, or to any of the streets Steve looks in. No one's seen him. He's starting to wonder if he's still in this city.

Where to go next, though, if he's not?

There are too many people, too many places Bucky could be.

That's pessimism talking though, not Steve. He gives himself a mental shake.

He's low on options, but he hasn't used up_ all_ of them, yet. Two more days. That's what he'll give himself. If he can't find Bucky then, he'll see if he can call in some favors with people who might have the sort of tech SHIELD did back before Steve shut them down. He's not going to let HYDRA find Bucky first. He knows one person, at least, who can probably do that. The problem is, he's also pretty sure Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, super hero, and Howard Stark's only son, doesn't know he exists. Still. What's the harm in trying? The worst he can do is be turned away.

Two days pass.

"I think he's moved on," Sam says.

"Yeah," Steve agrees.

They're both tired.

"Where to next?" Sam asks.

"New York."

"New York," Sam echoes, with the skepticism of someone who knows that everyone (like Bucky) knows that fully half the superheroes in America seem to live there.

It's a bad spot to hide. It's a bad spot to attack too.

Steve's not sure why so many super-villains do it anyway.

"New York," Steve says again, with confidence. More than he feels.

Sam raises an eyebrow at him. Steve steels himself, and squares his shoulders.

"We're going to Stark Tower."

Because he needs to do _something_ more than looking in all the wrong streets at all the wrong times, and while he doesn't know Stark at all, maybe, just maybe, appealing on the grounds of sharing a friendship with Howard will be enough.


End file.
